Joseph Herrera takes some Pet Sematary, and since there’s a seventh sequel on the horizon, a dash of Scream, and a tiny drop of Ghost in the Machine, blitzes it together like a Sonic blizzard and gives us sex, blood, and videotape with his clever influencer slasher, Dark Distortion.
After an adult content creator and influencer and her partner end up dead after one of their customary grifts, or hustles as our characters like to call it, in which these gorgeous X-rated talents lead greedy perverts to secluded rendezvous and fleece them of the promised price, plus everything else they have. What are they gonna do, report they like to pay for potential illegal delights?
Herrera trades the high school teens for a close working group of adult entertainers whose primary goal in life is fitness and followers, forging a path to fame by feeding the almighty algorithm. But all’s not well in influencer land. Layna (Christina Gonzalez) is blowing town and moving on. Only problem is a friend and fellow mattress actress, Promise (Lily Lurid) ends up among a rash of bodies tied to a string of brutal murders.
Lurking and lingering on the heels of an Andy Sidaris sexy squad is a malevolent loner with a camcorder, Jeremy (Joe Walker), not simply a weirdo with a past, but a really dark, dirty secret. Those fans of Pet Sematary out there get what I’m saying.
“…sex, blood, and videotape with his clever influencer slasher, Dark Distortion.”
Two seemingly impossibly-intertwinable plots threads run parallel, until they intersect in such a brilliant way, when the balance of power shifts from hot people dying horribly to a supernatural tale of dark family secrets and redemption colliding, the payoff is well worth the price of admission.
A third wheel to deepen the mystery at the heart of McGuffin also enters the picture as Jeremy’s bitter and heavily medicated ex-wife, Victoria (April Hartman). Beginning to sense an old evil, the same darkness that took her son’s life, Victoria defies her controlling mother and refuses the drugs that render her a living zombie, and sets out to play her part in the coming storm of death and chaos.
Genre fans might find they think they’ll be able to jump ahead of the plot. But Dark Distortions has a secret sauce that’ll keep you guessing until the setup is complete, and the road to a conjunction of threads and a devilish final duel lends this picture, which kicks off kind of ordinarily, a booster rocket that fires perfectly as ghost-face killer of a different kind emerges. His name is Sammy. And you’ll never see him coming till it’s all over.
Dark Distortion potentially introduces us to a new Mike Myers or Freddy Krueger. It’s well pastime indeed for fresh icons to stand on the shoulders of giants and reach for the unfathomable depths of terror and cry into the night with a blood-curdling scream, summoning the future of slasher cinema.
Like the killer at the center of the story, Dark Distortion snuck up on me. You get something similar, something different, something spooky, and something with enough blood, boobs, and a surprisingly smart shift in tone that made experiencing this twenty-first-century exploitation a black magic musing beauty.
"…Two seemingly impossibly-intertwinable plots threads run parallel..."
